The partial shutdown of America's Department of Homeland Security has created an extraordinary crisis at the nation's airports. Roughly 61,000 TSA employees are working without pay during the partial government shutdown, which began February 14. The consequences have been stark and immediate. More than 450 TSA officers have quit since the shutdown started, and many others are calling out, causing massive delays in security screenings at multiple airports nationwide.
Facing mounting travel chaos, the Trump administration this week made an unusual decision: deploy immigration enforcement agents to assist airport security operations. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were sent to 14 airports Monday, including some of those hit hardest by TSA staffing shortages. The deployment created immediate controversy over whether agents trained in immigration enforcement possess the skills and judgment needed for airport security work.
The financial toll on ordinary workers explains the scale of the crisis. The workers missed their first full paycheck in mid-March, after only receiving a partial paycheck at the end of February. More than 400 TSA officers have left their jobs while thousands of others called out from work because they can't afford gas, childcare, food or rent, according to Lauren Bis, acting assistant secretary for public affairs with the Department of Homeland Security. At some airports, the impact has been severe; at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, 37.4% of TSA workers have called out on average, TSA said.
What makes this scenario particularly fraught is the political context. Airport backlogs are the most visible consequence of a political standoff rooted in the January killings of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis: Renée Good and Alex Pretti. The Trump administration has sought to blame the shutdown standoff on Democrats, who have refused to fund DHS without new guardrails on ICE. Republicans have so far rejected those demands.
The decision to deploy ICE agents has proven controversial. Officials maintained a narrow scope for their role. Officials say the agents will support airport operations but will not carry out passenger screening. A senior ICE official told NBC News that at least 50 ICE personnel per shift will be at each airport and will not be performing screening duties. Another ICE official said that ICE officers and agents are not trained to use magnetometers or X-ray machines that TSA agents operate and oversee at airports. ICE officers and agents are trained in crowd control, monitoring lines and checking IDs, skills that could be useful at airport lines leading to security screening, the second ICE official said.
Yet serious objections have surfaced. The TSA officers' union rejected the plan outright. "Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a gap. It creates one," AFGE President Everett Kelley said in a statement. The worst-case scenario is an untrained screener misses something, and a terrorist exploits the gap to get on a plane.
There are also concerns about the message such deployment sends. The move has raised concerns among some travellers and civil rights groups, who worry the presence of immigration officers at airports could cause fear among immigrant communities, even if the agents are not conducting immigration checks. Civil liberties advocates have pointed to the timing, noting that Trump previously signalled that ICE agents at airports could conduct enforcement operations; a weekend post suggested emphasis on detaining undocumented immigrants from specific nations.
An asymmetry in the shutdown's impact has made the situation more stark. Even though ICE is part of the DHS, it is not affected in the same way as TSA because ICE already received separate funding through a major spending law passed last year. That law, known as Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act", gave ICE and CBP billions of dollars in funding that does not expire for several years. This means the agencies can continue operating and paying staff even if DHS funding is blocked. That ICE agents remain fully funded and deployed to airports while TSA officers work without pay underscores the political nature of the stalemate.
The underlying dispute reveals genuine disagreements about government priorities. Democrats have sought guardrails on immigration enforcement following the Minneapolis deaths. Republicans have argued that funding and policy reform should be separate questions. Neither side shows signs of yielding before scheduled Easter recess at week's end. Trump injected a new demand late Sunday, saying he doesn't want to make a deal unless Democrats support an elections overhaul bill that already faces stiff odds in the Senate.
For travellers caught in the chaos, the dispute is abstract. Andrew Leonard showed up at John F. Kennedy International Airport at 4:45 a.m. on Monday for his 7 a.m. flight to Seattle. Nearly two hours later, he made it through security and to his gate just in time for boarding. "I fly out of this terminal all the time and this is insane," said Leonard, a 34-year-old performing arts teacher in New York who was en route to Seattle ahead of a family vacation to Hawaii.